Free Jason's Gold by Will Hobbs

know it by heart. Listen:
    â€œOh, they scratches the earth and it tumbles out ,
    More than your hands can hold ,
    For the hills above and plains beneath
    Are cracking and busting with gold .
    â€œHow do you like it, Jason?”
    â€œIt makes me want to get up there and start digging.”
    He didn’t know what to make of this girl, except that he knew he liked her. Unguarded as a baby colt, she always looked him straight in the eye, and burst out with her enthusiasms. She was different from any girl he’d met, a bright new star in the sky.
    When it came to practical matters, Jason couldn’t help wondering about these two Canadians. Their things, which he’d helped to load on the scow, consisted of a sleek eighteen-foot canoe and no more than a five-hundred-pound outfit from food to gold pan. It seemed like the poet and his daughter stood only a slightly better chance of reaching the Klondike than the people he’d read about in the Minnesota newspaper who’d announced they were going to go by balloon. But he wasn’t going to say it.
    He did say, “You sure are going light.”
    â€œFast and light,” Jamie replied. “That’s Father’s strategy. We still have enough funds to pay the Indians to pack our canoe and outfit over to the other side. It’s all we have left from selling the farm, less what Father donated to the criminals in Skagway.”
    She added in a whisper, “We only got a thousand dollars for the farm. We have six hundred left.”
    â€œBut how will you eat this winter?”
    â€œFather’s Winchester will take care of that. He never really was a farmer, you see—we just came out of the North a few years ago, when he got the daft notion that I needed ‘civilizing,’ as he called it. Before that he worked for Hudson’s Bay Company his whole life, trapping and trading. I grew up at Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabaska, in the bush.”
    â€œIn a bush, did you say? Excuse me—”
    â€œ The bush, silly. In the wilderness . There’s moose, caribou, and mountain sheep in the Yukon country where we’re headed—we’ll be fine. We can make dry meat, pick berries and make pemmican, gather rose hips for tea. You should do that too, you know—a cup of rose hip tea once a week through the winter and you won’t get scurvy.”
    â€œWhat about the Yukon River? Can a canoe handle it?”
    â€œThis Peterborough we have is the best canoe in the world! Father says there’s no more than five miles of rapids in the whole journey. A beginner could paddle the rest of it in a canoe just fine—and we’re not beginners!”
    â€œThat Mountie post, wherever it is—aren’t you worried about it?”
    â€œIt’s past Lake Bennett, at the foot of Tagish Lake.But we won’t have to pay a customs duty like you will, because we bought everything in Canada.”
    â€œWhat I was trying to get at is the food requirement…. Isn’t it seven hundred pounds per person? Will the Mounties let you through with no more than you can carry in the canoe?”
    â€œThey’d better…. We’re Canadian citizens! With my father’s experience in the North, he has no doubt he can convince them we’ll do fine. All the Yellow Legs care about is that you’re not going to go up there and die. It’s only a three-week paddle to Dawson City. We’ll be there well before freeze-up.”
    Jason couldn’t help but grin. It made him feel good just listening to Jamie, so filled with confidence, so proud of her father and what they were attempting together.
    When they reached Dyea, the beach was swarming with the arrival of eight hundred Klondikers from the Islander offshore, the converted coal carrier Kid Barker had told him about. The horses, he remembered, were quartered above the first-class berths. He thought better of telling Jamie about those yellow